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Toneelgroep Amsterdam Theater Company Combining Three Antonioni Films For The Stage

Sometimes, those in Europe really have it better than us on this side of the pond.

According to Filmmaker Magazine, those who are lucky enough to be in London come the first week of February will be able to view the upcoming Toneelgroep Amsterdam theater company’s theatrical adaptation of three of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s most beloved pieces of cinema.



The troupe will be performing stage versions of L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, which will be ‘performed, filmed and projected onto a giant screen.’ The Guardian’s Maxie Szalwinska has had the chance to see the piece, and also sat down to chat with the project’s director, Ivo van Hove:

The film L’Avventura, by contrast, largely takes place on an eerie, windswept and lava-encrusted island near Sicily. ‘Antonioni’s space,’ wrote the film critic Pauline Kael, ‘is a vacuum in which people are aimlessly moving.’ Van Hove thinks the film ‘positions people so they are very small ‘“ lost in their environment. So I had to think about how to show the alienation between women and men in an urban setting.’

He does this by having multiple cameras on stage, which film his characters acting against a vast blue screen. Close-up footage of their faces is then superimposed on vistas that appear on a giant screen above the stage: the empty footbridges of the Minneapolis Skyway system, for example. So the audience gets to watch two things simultaneously: actors performing a scene together (looking lonely and lost on a spacious stage), while, up above, they’re transported to somewhere else entirely.

The setup ‘“ both distant and in your face ‘“ requires extremely economical performances. ‘They cannot lie because the camera is ruthless,’ says Van Hove. ‘Video and microphones are the tools of today. Why not use them? In the times of the Greek tragedies, they used masks ‘“ which were like huge close-ups of an emotion. But I never use cinematic methods in a purely aesthetic way. I try to make it dramaturgically necessary.’



Entitled the Antonioni Project, the project is another mash-up created by Hove, who has become famous for things of that nature (such as his mash of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony And Cleopatra.) Personally, I really hope that this somehow makes it stateside.   There is something about the narratives of Antonioni pictures that makes them the perfect fodder for solid stage adaptations, and while it’s hard to imagine a world where someone can do Antonioni better than Antonioni, this is a situation where a remake or a rehash is definitely worth the trouble.

What do you think?

Source: Filmmaker Magazine / The Guardian

Joshua Brunsting

Josh is a critic, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, a wrestling nerd, a hip-hop head, a father, a cinephile and a man looking to make his stamp on the world, one word at a time.